Memory Prices Are Still Climbing. Here's What That Does to Your Next Laptop.

When we wrote up the MacBook Neo in March, the headline number was $599. It is $699 now. That $100 is the clearest single data point in a story that has been building all year, and this week brought two more: a fresh memory-market forecast from TrendForce and a candid pricing update from Framework. Put together, they explain why the laptop you have been eyeing costs more than it did in spring, and why waiting is not the obvious move it usually is.

Everything here is drawn from public filings, company blogs and analyst reports. We have not bought anything or benchmarked anything for this piece.

The forecast

On September 30, TrendForce published its fourth-quarter memory outlook. The headline: conventional DRAM contract prices are expected to rise another 10 to 15 percent quarter over quarter, and NAND flash 15 to 20 percent. The reason has not changed since spring. Memory makers are pointing their newest fabs at server parts for AI data centers, which pay more, and the PC side gets what is left.

Two lines in the report matter more to laptop buyers than the percentages. First, TrendForce says PC makers "continue to procure aggressively amid expectations that DRAM supply will remain tight in 2027." Translation: the people who build laptops do not think this ends next quarter. Second, on storage, "PC brands are also reducing SSD capacities in mainstream models to lower BOM costs." That is the quiet one. The sticker price holds, the 512GB drive becomes 256GB, and the spec sheet gets a little harder to read.

What it looks like on a price tag

Apple was the loudest example. In June, Tim Cook told investors that price increases were "unavoidable," called the memory situation a "hundred-year flood," and said he had "never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years." A week later Apple raised US prices across the Mac and iPad lines: MacBook Neo from $599 to $699, MacBook Air from $1,099 to $1,299, the base MacBook Pro from $1,699 to $1,999, the iPad from $349 to $449. Those are the prices today.

Framework is the most transparent example, because it publishes its reasoning. The company's running memory pricing post, updated September 29, walks through a year of module costs going up, then a windfall. In July it nearly doubled the price of the 32GB and 64GB LPCAMM2 options on the new Laptop 13 Pro, from $439 to $800 and from $849 to $1,600 per Tom's Hardware, after a supplier quote that CEO Nirav Patel said came in at "more than double that of the prior inventory we had brought in." In September it found a cheaper batch of modules, cut those prices back down, and refunded the difference to people who had already paid. This week's update extends that cut to every remaining Laptop 13 Pro pre-order and to new orders.

Then the other shoe. Framework says it has "depleted inventory of several configurations that we built with lower cost memory and storage, and have now needed to increase pricing" on prebuilt Laptop 13 and Laptop 16 models, and warns more configurations will follow. Its advice to buyers is blunt: "If you need high capacity storage, you should configure a system with it now while we still have inventory at the older, lower cost basis." And if you can find RAM cheaper elsewhere, "we encourage you to bring your own memory."

The scale of the problem is in one sentence from the same post: a single rack of Nvidia's GB300 system "uses 20TB of HBM3E and 17TB of LPDDR5X. That's enough LPDDR5x for a thousand laptops."

The third example is the one nobody announces. Lenovo's new V15 G7 with Qualcomm's Snapdragon C chip, confirmed on Lenovo's spec database this week, lists entry configurations with 128GB of UFS storage, the slower kind used in phones, rather than an SSD. That is exactly the BOM trimming TrendForce describes, and we expect to see more of it at the bottom of the market this holiday season. Lenovo has not published a price yet.

So should you wait?

Normally the answer to "should I buy a laptop now or wait" is "wait, it gets cheaper." We do not think that holds this year, for three reasons.

TrendForce's forecast and Framework's commentary both point to tight supply into 2027, so there is no obvious relief on the calendar. Framework's own advice is to buy the storage you need now, and Framework sells upgrades for a living, so it has little reason to say that unless it means it. And Apple's June increases are still the prices on its store three months later; the Neo's financing line works out to $699.

What has actually improved is the second-hand and clearance market. Retailers still hold stock built with last year's cheaper memory, and that stock is priced to move before new, pricier configurations replace it. If you see a 2025-model laptop with 16GB and a 512GB SSD at a price that looks like last year, that is the deal, not the shiny new chip with 8GB and 256GB at the same money.

How to shop around it

Buy the memory you need on day one. On machines with soldered RAM, which is most thin laptops and every Mac, the configuration you pick at checkout is the configuration you keep. 16GB is the floor for anything you plan to use for four years. 8GB machines exist to hit a starting price.

Treat storage as the negotiable part. Unlike RAM, storage can live outside the laptop. A 256GB internal drive plus an external SSD is a reasonable way to dodge the upcharge on 1TB internal options, and the external drive moves to your next laptop.

If you are looking at a laptop with socketed memory, Framework's suggestion applies to every brand: check what the vendor charges for the upgrade against what a module costs at retail, then decide. The gap can be large in either direction right now because vendors bought at different times.

And read the spec sheet for the storage type, not just the size. "128GB UFS" and "128GB SSD" are not the same experience, and the first is going to show up on more budget laptops than it used to.

We will keep an eye on the Q4 numbers as they land. For now, the honest summary is that memory is the most expensive part of a cheap laptop, it is getting more expensive, and the manufacturers have run out of places to hide it.

Prices and forecasts in this article are from TrendForce's September 30, 2026 press release, Framework's blog post as updated September 29, 2026, MacRumors' reports of June 17 and June 25, 2026, and the Tom's Hardware and Notebookcheck reports linked above, as read on October 1, 2026. Prices and availability may change after publication.